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The Widower's Tale (Compact Disc)

August 2010 Indie Next List

“Julia Glass follows classic tradition, proving once again that family is the original source of comedy, tragedy, and frustration. Her newest novel is a meditation on love, both filial and romantic, and how hopelessly ridiculous we all become if we don't make the effort to temper our passions with reason or our actions with accountability.”
— Emily Crowe, Odyssey Bookshop, South Hadley, MA

April 2012 Indie Next List

“Julia Glass follows classic tradition, proving once again that family is the original source of comedy, tragedy, and frustration. Her newest novel is a meditation on love, both filial and romantic, and how hopelessly ridiculous we all become if we don't make the effort to temper our passions with reason or our actions with accountability.”
— Emily Crowe, Odyssey Bookshop, South Hadley, MA

Description

In a historic farmhouse outside Boston, seventy-year-old Percy Darling is settling happily into retirement: reading novels, watching old movies, and swimming naked in his pond. His routines are disrupted, however, when he is persuaded to let a locally beloved preschool take over his barn. As Percy sees his rural refuge overrun by children, parents, and teachers, he must reexamine the solitary life he has made in the three decades since the sudden death of his wife. No longer can he remain aloof from his community, his two grown daughters, or, to his shock, the precarious joy of falling in love.

One relationship Percy treasures is the bond with his oldest grandchild, Robert, a premed student at Harvard. Robert has long assumed he will follow in the footsteps of his mother, a prominent physician, but he begins to question his ambitions when confronted by a charismatic roommate who preaches—and begins to practice—an extreme form of ecological activism, targeting Boston’s most affluent suburbs.

Meanwhile, two other men become fatefully involved with Percy and Robert: Ira, a gay teacher at the preschool, and Celestino, a Guatemalan gardener who works for Percy’s neighbor, each one striving to overcome a sense of personal exile. Choices made by all four men, as well as by the women around them, collide forcefully on one lovely spring evening, upending everyone’s lives, but none more radically than Percy’s.

With equal parts affection and satire, Julia Glass spins a captivating tale about the loyalties, rivalries, and secrets of a very particular family. Yet again, she plumbs the human heart brilliantly, dramatically, and movingly.

About the Author

Julia Glass was awarded the 2002 National Book Award for fiction, the 2000 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, and has won several prizes for her short stories, including three Nelson Algren Awards and the Tobias Wolff Award. "Collies," the first part of "Three Junes," won the 1999 Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society Medal for Best Novella. She lives with her family in New York City, where she works as a freelance journalist and editor.

Mark Bramhall has won more than two dozen AudioFile Earphones Awards and was a finalist for the Audiobook Publishers Association s prestigious Audie Award in 2013. He has been named by "Publishers Weekly" and "AudioFile" magazine among their Best Voices of the Year in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013. He is also an award-winning actor whose acting credits include off-Broadway, regional, and many Los Angeles venues as well as television, animation, and feature films. He has taught and directed at the American Academy of Dramatic Art.

Praise For…

Praise for The Widower’s Tale

“A satisfyingly cleareyed and compassionate view of American entitlement and its fallout. . . The family is society’s most inescapable institution, but in Glass’s hands it’s also the most shifting and vulnerable. And in The Widower’s Tale she approaches the ties of kinship with the same joyfully disruptive spirit that animated her previous books.”—Maria Russo, The New York Times Book Review

“An enchanting story of familial bonds and late-life romance. Expect to be infatuated with Glass’s protagonist, 70-year-old Percy Darling, he of generous soul, dry wit, and courtly manners.” —Oprah

“Glass effortlessly ping-pongs between three dramas to show how everyday love and lies can make—or completely destroy—a life. This one’s perfect for when you’ve got the night all to yourself and want to keep thinking long after the last page is turned.” —Redbook

“Tremendously engaging . . . It's a large, endearing cast, bursting with emotional and social issues, and Glass slips effortlessly between their individual and enmeshed dramas. As she well proved in her National Book Award-winning Three Junes, Glass crafts dense and absorbing reads that are as charming as they are provocative.” —Karen Valby, Entertainment Weekly

“Both funny and heartbreaking, [Glass’s] fourth novel will eave readers examining their own choices and priorities . . . One of the most remarkable aspects of Glass’s novel is that she writes convincingly from multiple points of view, classes and stations in life.” —Bookpage

“Alluring descriptions, along with discerning characters, intricate plot lines, and the tackling of several complex issues offers an empathetic yet lively read.”—New York Journal of Books

“Glass spins a beautifully paced, keenly observed story in which certainties give way to surprising reversals of fortune . . . Glass handles coalescing plot elements with astute insight into the complexity of family relationships, the gulf between social classes, and our modern culture of excess to create a dramatic, thought-provoking, and immensely satisfying novel.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Glass’s perfect plot gives each character his or her due, in an irresistible pastoral tragicomedy that showcases the warmth and wisdom of one of America’s finest novelists, approaching if not already arrived at her peak.” —Kirkus, starred review

“Rich, intricate, and alive with emotion . . . An honest portrait of sister-love and sister-hate—interlocking, brave, and forgiving.” —The New York Times Book Review

“One doesn’t read so much as sink into a Julia Glass novel, lulled into an escapist reverie by her mastery . . . A novel that begins as sophisticated diversion [becomes] a haunting dissection of human fragility.” —People

Praise for The Whole World Over

“[Glass’s] second novel is even finer than her first . . . Her characters are enticingly complex, their predicaments are provocative and significant . . . Her love for animals, feel for landscape, and ardor for language itself feed the freshness, sensuousness, and compassion that make this such a nourishing and pleasurable read.” —Chicago Tribune“Beautiful and satisfying, chock-full of the gorgeous, heartbreaking stuff that makes life worth living.” —Rocky Mountain News